The Blank Slate

The author recalls the first lecture he went to as a graduate student at Harvard by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in 1976 to illustrate that the scientific dialogue on human nature could be highly politicized, particularly in the 1970s. For example, the arguments of Richard Herrnstein, a psychologist who predicted that as nongenetic factors influencing IQ scores (such as lack of access to opportunities) decreased in importance, genetic factors would become more important. He was denounced by protesters as a Fascist. Scientists such as Paul Ekman (a psychologist who spoke about innate commonalities among people, such as the similar facial expressions displayed and understood worldwide) were also attacked.

Pinker discusses the reaction to E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology. Wilson challenged the idea of human culture as distinctive. Scientific figures such as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and geneticist Richard Lewontin attacked his ideas as a form of biological determinism similar to ideas buttressed by Nazis and eugenicists. However, Wilson argued that human societies are flexible, rather than rigidly determined, and that different populations are not arranged in a hierarchy but are actually similar to each other. Wilson and his followers were attacked at lectures.

Gould and Lewontin, along with neuroscientist Steven Rose, also attacked Richard Dawkins, author of the 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which lays out the logic of evolutionary theories. Their main criticisms can be summarized as characterizing Wilson and Dawkins’s ideas as falling into the camps of “determinism” and “reductionism.” According to Pinker, however, Dawkins did not suggest that human behavior is totally determined but rather that humans have a tendency to act in certain ways in certain instances. Pinker also argues against the idea that Dawkins is a reductionist who reduces each human trait to its own gene. Dawkins and Wilson used phrases such as “a gene for X,” referring to such behavior as aggression, but they were suggesting that genes only increased one’s likelihood of acting in a certain way. 

Pinker also discusses the 2000 actions of anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel in reaction geneticist James Neel and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. Turner and Sponsel said that Neel had infected the Yanomamo people of the Amazon rainforest with measles and had withheld care in order to test one of his theories. Chagnon, who had documented that men who had been part of a killing among the Yanomamo had more wives and offspring, was accused of causing the violence himself. Pinker writes that Neel was in fact against eugenicist theory and worked to rid his field of it, and that he and Chagnon administered a vaccine to the Yanomamo that saved many lives. Moreover, the violence of the Yanomamo has long been documented; Chagnon did not cause it. Pinker believes that Turner and Sponsel are falling prey to the idea of the Noble Savage, and that other defenders of the Blank Slate have succumbed to lazy thinking. Just because some behavior is innate, it does not mean that all behavior is.

In this chapter, Pinker writes about how supports for the theories of the Blank Slate, Noble Savage, and Ghost in the Machine can be politically motivated. Gould, for example, has called Wilson’s work an example of “biological determinism” (122)—referring to the idea that genes cause 100% of human behavior—and has endorsed “biological potentiality”—the idea that the brain is capable of a range of behaviors. Pinker refers to this line of reasoning as a “tautology,” or obviously true.

Sociobiologists also still cherish the idea of the Noble Savage. Gould argues, based on his idea of the Great Asymmetry, that kind people outnumber others “by thousands to one” (125). However, Pinker points out that people can have evil motives without being evil all the time and states that data does not back up Gould’s claim.

Sociobiologists also endorse the idea of the Ghost in the Machine. Lewontin and others have been up front about explaining that their ideas come from an application of Marxist philosophy. Separating humans from the environment is, in their view, a contradiction of dialectical philosophy which proposes that humans and their environment are inseparable. They believe that, in Rose’s words, “we have the ability to construct our own futures” (127). Gould also supports Marx’s ideas about “making our own history” (127). Pinker believes these scientists have set up a false dichotomy between a genetic brain on one side and a desire for peace and justice on the other.

Pinker writes that the Ghost in the Machine is even more cherished by the political right than by the political left. Christian fundamentalists in particular disagree with the forces of evolution, which challenges the truth of the creation story in the Bible. In a larger sense, religious people believe that humans were placed on earth to live morally and in accordance with God’s commandments rather than their biological urges. Creationists try to hobble or water down the teaching of evolution in public schools. Fundamentalists are challenged by neuroscience, which undermines the idea of a soul.

The neoconservative movement also attacks the science of human nature by advocating Intelligent Design, an idea originated by a biochemist named Michael Behe. This idea is that God must have designed the molecular design of cells, which cannot function in any simpler form and therefore could not have evolved from natural selection. However, biologists contradict this idea, and Pinker states that science does not support Behe’s idea of “irreducible complexity” (130). Many intellectual neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol, endorse the same ideas as religious fundamentalists, and they dislike neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, which they believe does away with the ideas of the soul and free will.

The political left and right are united in the belief that the sciences of human nature “threaten the concept of moral responsibility” (132). Pinker argues that the attacks from the right will eventually founder because the evidence supports the idea of natural selection. However, he believes that the left, with its reverence of Rose and Gould, has done greater harm to intellectual life because even prestigious publications falsely equate evolutionary psychology with Social Darwinism and behavioral genetics with eugenics. People who oppose the ideas of the Blank Slate or Noble Savage are branded as “Nazis” (134). However, Pinker believes that the intellectual climate is starting to shift. The weight of evidence is behind sociobiology; the question is what to do with it.